Dr. Tansey earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in biological sciences from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and her Ph.D. in cell regulation from the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Dallas, Texas.

After post-doctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis, she spent two years in the biotechnology sector specializing in therapy development. Dr. Tansey returned to academia as an Assistant Professor of Physiology at UTSW in 2002, becoming a tenured Associate Professor in 2009. She subsequently joined the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta where she became Professor of Physiology in 2017 and was named Director of the Center for Neurodysfunction and Inflammation in the School of Medicine in 2018.

In 2019, Dr. Tansey became the Director of the Center for Translational Research in Neurodegenerative Disease and the first endowed chair of the Norman Fixel Institute of Neurological Diseases at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Florida.

Dr. Tansey’s research focuses on the role of inflammation and immune system responses in brain health and the development of disease. She studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), autism spectrum disorders and depression, with a long-term goal of developing better therapies to prevent and treat these chronic disorders.